


When the Light Came Through

by ShowMeAHero



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-26
Updated: 2015-11-26
Packaged: 2018-05-03 10:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5287622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShowMeAHero/pseuds/ShowMeAHero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve didn't realize who his soulmate was until it's too late; luckily, Steve also gets a second chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Light Came Through

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently, I'm on a soulmate kick lately. Who knew.
> 
> Title taken from ["Colors" by Halsey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNt28Tx-cw0).

Steve Rogers was five years old when Bucky Barnes first stopped him from getting beat on outside their elementary school, during the second week of school of their entire lives. Steve could not see anything, face pressed into the dirt as it was, but the fists on his back were suddenly gone. He lifted his head tentatively, and locked eyes with a brunette little boy with a scrape on his knee and a bruise blooming on his cheek.

The boy stared back at him, distracted from the bigger boy who he had been fighting off. The bigger boy grabbed the brunette staring at Steve, but, once the brunette got his bearings, he was able to send the bully packing. He held out a hand to Steve after the bigger boy was gone and hauled him up out of the dirt.

“You got a black eye,” the boy said. “Actually, it’s kinda purpley.”

“You can see colors,” Steve said, dusting himself off before looking up at the boy.

“Yeah, actually, I just started when I saw-”

“I can’t,” Steve said, accidentally interrupting the boy, who had been talking too close to his deaf ear. He wiped a hand under his bloody nose, smearing what he's been told was red across the back of his wrist. He frowned down at the smudge before sticking out his other hand. “I’m Steve Rogers. Thanks for helping me.”

The brunette had a little frown on his face, but he shook Steve’s hand anyways, vigorous like an adult’s grip might be. “My name’s James Barnes.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Steve said, grinning up at him, one of his teeth a little loose, a bunch of them crooked. The boy smiled back at him and never said another word about the day he started to see his colors.

* * *

When Steve got taken into the Super Soldier program, he wondered if he might find a soulmate now that he was going to be made into something bigger and better than he had been. Peggy never triggered anything, and she never talked about having her own colors, but maybe it was just because he wasn’t what he was going to be. He was still just little Steve Rogers from Brooklyn; maybe someone would fall in love with him when he was something more.

He figured it didn’t work that way, but it didn’t really hurt to dream. He wished Bucky had been his soulmate, but Bucky’s seen colors since Steve knew him, and Steve hasn’t seen colors to date, so Bucky had a soulmate somewhere out there who just wasn’t Steve. The sooner Steve got over that, the sooner he could move on and find someone who would be a better match for him than Bucky, however impossible it seemed.

Steve got the serum. Steve opened his eyes, and Steve saw in color. He blinked, and blinked, and blinked again, and wondered if it was Peggy who did it, or maybe Howard Stark, but he had seen all them before. Maybe their souls recognized something more in the new him?

He asked Peggy if she saw colors, later, and she said no, not yet. Howard said he saw colors before he even met Steve. Steve left too quickly, in pursuit of Erskine’s killer, to properly talk to everyone who had been there that day; he assumed it must have been one of them. He wished Bucky had been there that day.

* * *

Bucky plummeted to his death the split second Steve stopped seeing color, and Steve has never felt more tortured in his life, nor more confused. Watching Bucky fall from the train, grasping for Steve’s hand like he still might be able to grab it, was painful enough; staring at the spot he fell to while the world returned to blacks and whites and shades of grey around him was a living horror story.

Steve tried to find out if it was possible, if someone could have a delayed colors gaining, or maybe someone just _happened_ to die at the same time as Bucky, if there was any chance he and Bucky weren’t soulmates and any chance he hadn’t wasted all their time and any chance he hadn’t lost his best friend _and_ his brother  _and_ his soulmate because he was too weak, too cowardly, too inadequate-

He found his own medical files in his search, and discovered he had been colorblind. Not like everyone else had been colorblind, but _really_ colorblind - genuinely, medically colorblind, something that finding your soulmate couldn’t fix. He wondered if Bucky had gotten his colors that first day they met; Steve must have, too. He just never knew it. He couldn’t’ve known. They were just lying in wait, holding out for him to get the serum and show him that Bucky was the guy he had been waiting for the whole time. And he was too blind to see it.

Bucky knew the whole time, was the kicker. Bucky _knew_ , but he thought Steve had another soulmate, so he never said anything. Bucky died knowing he was Steve’s soulmate, but not knowing Steve was his. Steve could’ve died on the spot from thinking that. Steve didn’t know he could have seen in color at age six, if he had been a healthy boy, like Bucky had been. Bucky had gotten his colors, and Steve was supposed to. Bucky had gotten his colors, and he pretended like he didn’t know when, because he wanted Steve to find some person out there who was supposed to be his soulmate. Bucky was too good for him, too selfless; but now, Bucky’s dead, and he never got to be Steve’s soulmate, and Steve never got to be his, and he fucked it all up, he just fucked it all up.

Steve wished he could get drunk. He tried, valiantly, and Peggy talked him down. She asked him later - as she often did - how her dress looked, if the color was nice, because he could see colors and would give her an honest opinion. When he shook his head, Peggy held him tight and apologized for everything he had lost. Steve wondered what the point was, but never told Peggy about his questions. She still had a soulmate to find. Steve had no soulmate, no family, no goals. He felt raw, opened, and trapped, in the monochromatic world that Bucky’s death left him stranded in.

* * *

Steve took back that he had never felt more confused than he did when Bucky fell and he lost his colors; this was far more confusing, this life where he had Bucky back but still couldn’t see colors. Bucky’s mask got ripped off, he stared into the eyes he knew better than he knew his own, and couldn’t see how brilliant they were, in full technicolor.

He didn’t see in color when Bucky beat the stuffing out of him on the helicarrier, or when Bucky snuck into the hospital to stare at him, or when Steve finally caught up to him in Italy, and Bucky stared up at him and gave him information only Bucky Barnes could have had. Steve bundled him up and hauled him home after that. If he stared hard at Bucky’s face sometimes, trying to force his colors to come back - well, that was no one’s business but his own.

Bucky still saw in color, even though he seemed not to remember his soulmate was Steve. He was a fairly bad liar when it came to Steve, and never great with keeping secrets, if he wasn’t being quiet. When Steve asked him something, Bucky either didn’t speak, or told the truth.

“Hey, Buck?” Steve had asked one day, while Bucky was teaching Sam how to knit and Steve held their yarn. Bucky hummed to show Steve he had heard him. “Do you remember who your soulmate is?”

Bucky frowned, that little dig between his eyebrows coming back as he looked up at Steve and shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. Did I ever tell you?”

“No,” Steve said, because it was, technically, the truth; Bucky had never told Steve that they were soulmates. Steve had figured that one out all alone. Steve tried to get over it; with time, it got easier to forget about it for lengths of time, to stop puzzling over where his colors went when Bucky was so clearly the answer.

It all came to light, as it were, on some random Tuesday. Steve had been flicking through old photo albums the Smithsonian had given back to him, after having taken them from his apartment following his crash in the ice and subsequent assumed death. He pulled out a picture of himself and Bucky, the two of them small and missing teeth and beaming at the camera, tiny scraped arms wrapped around one another, a black eye on Bucky’s face, a split lip and a broken nose on Steve’s. Steve nudged Bucky, who had been sitting next to him, reading a trashy romance novel.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said, handing the photo over. “Remember this one?”

Bucky took it, and he stared at it. Then, he stared harder, pulling the photo closer to his eyes, setting his book aside. He looked from the photo up at Steve and, as if a switch got flipped, Steve had all his colors back.

“I remember this,” Bucky said, at the same time Steve said, in a choked voice, “Buck.”

“What?” Bucky asked, and Steve had already crushed him to his chest in a hug that could have killed a normal man. “Steve, _what_ -”

“I can see colors again,” Steve told him, face buried in Bucky’s neck, and Bucky pried him off enough to look into his face.

“You could see in colors _before_?” Bucky asked. and Steve grabbed Bucky’s face in his hands. Bucky stared at him, cheeks pushed in slightly towards his nose by Steve’s huge hands.

“You’re you,” Steve said. “Bucky. You’re my Bucky.”

“I’ve always been your Bucky,” Bucky replied, and Steve squashed them together again. Bucky patted at Steve’s back until they separated again. “I just- I don’t know. I remember this. I remember…” Bucky trailed off, frowning down at the picture before a memory dawned in his eyes, realization like a sunrise behind the brilliant blues and browns of his irises. “ _Steve._ ”

Before Steve could respond, Bucky had his hands on Steve’s face, one side hot, one side cold, and was smashing their mouths together. Steve laughed, breathless, helpless, and pushed him back against the arm of the sofa to kiss the daylights out of him.

“You’ve been my soulmate the whole time and I didn’t tell you,” Bucky confessed, all in a rush, and Steve moved to kiss at his neck.

“You’ve been my soulmate the whole time but I was actually colorblind so I didn’t figure it out until you were gone,” Steve admitted in return. “But then- Why did it-”

“I died,” Bucky said. “I died, they said I died, and then- they _brainwashed_ me, I wasn’t-”

“It’s okay,” Steve said, when Bucky clearly came to an empty well for his words. “You’re you. It’s okay.”

Bucky flipped their positions, lurching up to throw Steve against the other end of the sofa and pin him there, against the soft cushions. He pressed his nose into the vulnerable space underneath the knob of Steve’s jaw and, for the first time since coming back, he relaxed. Steve let one of his hands come up, sliding its way up Bucky’s back to tangle in the hair at the back of his head, palm brushing his skull. Bucky sighed, warm and comfortable, his hips resting against Steve, letting Steve take his weight in a way he never had before.

“I love you,” Steve said, like it was a revelation, like it was an apology. Bucky took it for everything it was, and a thousand more, like every color in the world, in any spectrum, in space, in time.

“I love you, too,” Bucky replied, and, to Steve, his voice was polychromatic lifetime, a vibrant rainbow in their mouths.

 

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me on Twitter at [@nicoIodeon](https://twitter.com/nicoIodeon) or on Tumblr at [andillwriteyouatragedy](http://andillwriteyouatragedy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
